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Guest blogger's blog

Lucia Michielin, currently working for the Software Sustainability Institute, tells us about the Edinburgh Carpentries effort and a networking event to be held on the 24th of May.

Edinburgh Carpentries, a new training initiative, was launched on September 2018 at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute. Since then the initiative has started to propagate to other institutes in the Edinburgh area, eg Heriot Watt University. Edinburgh Carpentries uses and leverages teaching materials and infrastructure from The Carpentries (carpentries.org) .

Former HPC-EUROPA3 visitor Dr Mats Simmermacher, Dr Adam Kirrander (Mats' host from the University of Edinburgh's School of Chemistry), and their collaborators from Edinburgh and Copenhagen have recently published a paper in the prestigious Physical Review Letters where they discuss a new effect in ultrafast X-ray scattering.

Seventeen-year-old Sam Dewar spent a week at EPCC in October as part of his school's work experience programme. In this post he describes how he got on.

I spent a week doing work experience at EPCC, where I was given the goal of setting up and testing a homemade Raspberry Pi cluster ‘Wee Archlet’ using a set of instructions provided to me. I also helped find areas for improvement in the instructions by pointing out parts that I struggled to understand so that other people who have little experience with supercomputers can make a cluster too.

The SpiNNaker neuromorphic high-performance computing platform, which aims to run 1% of the human brain in real time, will arrive at EPCC in the Bayes building this year. SpiNNaker is a novel hardware platform due to its massive parallelism, multi-cast communication fabric and low power design.

The Auralisation of Acoustics in Architecture project is considering how to improve the modelling of sound qualities in rooms, whether existing, planned or ruined. Brian Hamilton of the University of Edinburgh's Acoustics & Audio Group writes about this collaboration with EPCC.

Last August EPCC’s James Perry, Kostas Kavoussanakis and I started work on the Auralisation of Acoustics in Architecture (A3) project. One of its goals was to explore the use of ray-tracing techniques to model the sound qualities of a room. Such a tool could help optimise the acoustics of an existing or future concert hall, improving the audience’s listening experience. It could also help recreate the sound characteristics of ruined historical spaces.

Hello, my name is Aliki Kavoussanaki. I’m 16 years old and four weeks ago I started working at EPCC. I was here in November for work experience which was arranged by my school and, afterwards, I was told that I could have the opportunity to come back in the summer holidays. I’m very happy that I had this chance and took it.

Dr Martin Lepšík came on an HPC-Europa3 visit from 16-29 July and was hosted by Dr Emanuele Paci at the University of Leeds. Martin started his visit by coming to Edinburgh.

My name is Martin Lepšík, and I am a Czech computational structural biologist. After 11 years of fruitful research in quantum mechanics-based drug design (at P. Hobza’s group at IOCB, Prague, CR), I decided to enrich my expertise with enhanced-sampling molecular dynamics of lectin-carbohydrate complexes, important for human health and disease.